Listening

I gave up on listening to podcasts, sermons and the like at work a while back, because I was finding I was too distracted and missing bits of them and getting frustrated. So I’ve just been listening to music. But I have decided that something is better than nothing and there are lots of interesting things I could glean snippets from even if I don’t get it all. So, on a whim I clicked on this link from Soph’s blog on Friday to a talk on Unconditional Love from This American Life, about a Romanian orphan who was adopted but manifested severe attachment disorder, and boy oh boy, I had the tissues out and all (and incidentally, Frans de Waal refers to the horrible experiments of the Romanian orphanages in his post on the God-Science Shouting Match I linked below).

Today I have been cruising through Tim Keller’s sermons on The Prodigal God, and sure I’ve missed bits, but it’s been really good. I can’t listen to sermons from anywhere here, because I don’t seem to have Quick Time (so I can’t listen to sermons from my own church, which is a nuisance) but I think I’m going to get myself back on the sermon podcast circuit. I've read Keller's book, but so far, from memory, the talks are quite different, and he has a lot to say in the first two about "community".